That's what's cool - nobody knows for sure. Is it a buried UFO? An underwater volcano? All we know is that the International Space Station shot pictures of the circle forming and then breaking as the ice melted during the month of April. Researchers say the ice on this lake often forms overnight and melts during the day, so possibly a spurt of hot water from below the lake is causing the already-thin ice to create this pattern. But what would emit hot water in a perfectly circular pattern?

If you've seen the show Surface, I think you already know the answer. Below, you can see both circles.

via Xenophilia

According to a release on the study:

"This is in part due to differences in exposure, the large variability among the cities analyzed, the differences in adaptive capacity and the vulnerability of populations due to their socio-demographic characteristics, as well as differences in the preventive measures in place," said [city of Rome epidemiologist] Paola Michelozzi. "Moreover, across European countries there is wide variation in healthcare and hospital admissions availability. Although all these differences are important, our results document an effect of high temperature on hospital admissions for respiratory causes in several cities, and this is the strength of the study."

"These findings are important for public health because the prevalence of chronic diseases, such as COPD, is expected to increase in developed countries as a result of population aging," wrote Dr. Michelozzi. "Furthermore, under climate change scenarios, the increase in extreme weather events and certain air pollutants, especially ozone, are likely to further aggravate chronic respiratory diseases. Public health interventions should be directed at preventing this additional burden of disease during the summer season. The observed heterogeneity of the health effects indicates a need to tailor programs for individual cities."

SOURCES:

American Thoracic Society

Eurekalert

Below is the area soon after the breach. You can see the rivers around the area are pale blue, full of the toxic slurry. And the landscape itself around the plant are blackened by the ash.

SOURCE: NASA Earth Observatory

Instead of working rice paddies, Chinese farmers today care for solar cells that feed energy-hungry cities. Below, you can see smog-shrouded Xining looming over its new power station. The solar farm will expand considerably before it's complete.

Photo by China Photos/Getty Images.

The carbon dioxide output of these cold-weather fungi is important because they come from regions that are responsible for 30 percent of the world's carbon output from soil. Left to live out their natural lives the shrooms would emit quite a bit of carbon dioxide — and scientists had previously thought they'd emit even more after dying.

To find out for sure, ecology researchers compared the carbon dioxide output of fungi in two different greenhouses: One at traditional, chilly temperatures, and one warmed by the 5 degrees that experts predict will result from climate change. Once the mushrooms warmed up, they died and significantly cut down on the overall carbon dioxide output of the forest biosphere.

In the study, published today in Global Change Biology, the authors write that "soil in warmed greenhouses produced about half as much carbon dioxide as soil in cooler control plots." So that means some of nature's biggest carbon dioxide factories might cut their production in half once the planet starts heating up.

Evolutionary biologist and co-author of the study Kathleen Treseder said:

It's fortuitous for humans that the fungi are negatively affected by this warming. It's not so great for the fungi, but might help offset a little bit of the carbon dioxide we are putting directly into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.

So killing little bits of the Earth might save the Earth?

Source: Global Change Biology

Alaskan mushroom image via The Road is Life.

Here you can see an industrial area slowly breaking down into nothing. And I love the two images below, which show the greening of a shopping area as it slowly goes back to nature.

Images of the Apocalypse [via Pink Tentacle]

It's a region that is likely to become contested by Canada and Denmark, who both lay claim to parts of the formerly-useless area. (Some of you may recall the Hans Island territorial struggle between the two nations, which at one point bizarrely became a skirmish over Google adwords.) Also, as the planet heats up, northern regions like Nunavut in Canada may become valuable real estate. So as environmentalists and systems biologists wring their hands over the biosphere beatings, the locals are going to be counting this bit of climate change a financial windfall.

Source: Live Science

Budd says:

The PIMs act a bit like a sponge when hydrogen is around. It's made up of long molecules that can trap hydrogen between them, providing a way of supplying hydrogen on demand.

Imagine a plate of spaghetti - when it's all coiled together there's not much space between the strands. Now imagine a plate of crispy noodles - their rigid twisted shape means there are lots of holes. The polymer is designed to have a rigid backbone, and it has twists and bends built into it. Because of this, lots of gaps and holes are created between molecules - perfect for tucking the hydrogen into.

The holes between the molecules give the polymer a very high surface area - each gram has a surface area equivalent to around three tennis courts. The molecules in the polymer act like sieves, catching smaller molecules like hydrogen in the gaps between them. The holes created in the polymer between molecules are a good fit for hydrogen. Hydrogen molecules stick in these holes and are kept there by weak forces - this means they can be released when they are needed.

Hydrogen is most sticky when it is cooled down to low temperatures. When the hydrogen is needed to power the car, the system would just raise the temperature to free up the hydrogen molecules.

According to Inhabitat, there's good reason to call this building green:

A solar photovoltaic array on the roof provides shade for top level parking and on-site renewable energy. The materials used in construction were recycled and finished with low-VOC paints and finishes. The building envelope utilizes low-e glazing to decrease heating and cooling loads and the mechanicals are energy efficient. A storm-drain water-treatment system helps reduce tainted runoff from directly entering the hydrosphere and greywater harvesting provides for landscaping and on-site facilities.

First LEED Parking Garage [Inhabitat]

Air Tree Structures in Madrid [Inhabitat]

Pictures from the end of the World [TreeHugger]

• It's official: the Earth is getting more tropical. Global warming has expanded the tropical band around the center of the planet over the past two decades, and it looks like it will expand more over the next century. [Reuters]
• Researchers repaired major skull damage in mice using human embryonic stem cells. They grew new bone on a special tissue-engineering edifice and popped it right into the mouse skulls. So stem cells are good for something, after all. [Science Daily] Why chimps are smarter than humans and dinosaurs had hooves after the jump.

• Get humble, homo sapiens. We may have invented cars, but chimps remember numbers better than humans do in a simple memory test. [New Scientist]
  
• A sixteen-year-old dinosaur enthusiast discovered the frozen, mummified remains of a dinosaur in Montana, complete with muscle tissue and skin. That was back in 1999, and now the high-tech paleontological research is in. Turns out this dino had hooves and scales [National Geographic].
  
• In England, the National Lottery funded a psychology research study which proved that money doesn't make people happy. Not exactly the outcome the Lottery was hoping for, I'd wager. [Science Daily]

• General Electric is investing in artificial spinal discs that could replace parts of your diseased backbone. The springy metal discs are inserted directly into your spine and use a bearing to create motion. [Spinal Motion]
• Apparently brain surgeries aren't going very well in Rhode Island, where doctors have operated on the wrong side of people's brains three times this year. [WSJ] After the break, a gene that kills cancer cells and Washington's nuclear waste.
• Cancer-resistant mice have been created who won't grow tumors even when bathed in radiation. The secret? A gene that stops cancer in its tracks. Could a human version of the gene be next? [Science Daily]
  
• What has happened to the millions of gallons of toxic waste stored underground near Hanaford in Washington State? Apparently nobody thought to check until a bunch of scientists wondered the same thing. Find out what horrors they discovered. [Eurekalert]
  
• Viruses are getting nastier. A new strain of the common cold virus is causing severe pneumonia and has already killed 10 people. Time to start wearing those surgical face masks everywhere you go! [New Scientist]

• Wind power may not be a clean energy source of the future after all. Though Sweden has just built a massive wind farm at sea, most countries have found wind an inefficient and unreliable energy source. [New York Times]
  
  Why brain damage is okay and MySpace experiences white flight after the jump.

• Just because you're brain damaged and lose a huge part of your memory, it doesn't mean you don't care. A study published today shows that people with profound memory loss can still empathize with other people and figure out what they are feeling. In other words, you don't need specific memories of your life in order to have social skills. So that whole subplot about the hot, romantic amnesiac on Gray's Anatomy is based in scientific fact, OK? [Scienceblog]
  
• Apparently, your race and parents' educational background are the main things that determine whether you'll join MySpace. Researchers at Northwestern found that Latinos prefer MySpace, as do the children of people with less than a high school education. White kids whose parents went to college prefer Facebook. Could mass social network abandonment for Facebook be the white flight of the future? [Northwestern University]
  
• Mars doubled in brightness over the past month, and backyard astronomers are taking pictures of its blue-white polor ice caps. Meanwhile, it turns out the sun may be smaller than we thought. [NASA and New Scientist]

The nation of Ecotopia has been isolated from the United States for 20 years, but at last they've agreed to let in one American reporter to see their secretive nation. Once known as Northern California, Oregon and Washington, Ecotopia wrested its independence from the US in a fierce helicopter war over the Sierra Nevadas. Now ruled by an all-female government, Ecotopia runs a stable-state economy aimed at maintaining total harmony with the environment. Market Street in San Francisco has become a river again. People all have access to computers, they work only 20 hours per week, and have nice houses that can be mulched in an instant. African-Americans run all the prisons. There are no sexual taboos. And every once in a while, a bunch of men get together, do drugs, and kill each other just to get their war urges out.

Violence hasn't gone away, and in some ways Ecotopia can only exist because the rest of the world continues to chug along in its polluted, industrial-capitalist state. Reporter Will Weston is repulsed, but eventually seduced, by what he finds when he crosses the border into this strange new land.

Ralph Nader endorsed Ecotopia when it came out because it's one of those rare books that works as a political treatise while also being a damn entertaining read. If you're looking for another world to visit during this time of conspicuous consumption, Ecotopia is the ticket.

In the interview, Jones said:

The future of all humanity, and most species and systems, will be determined by what we choose to do with cities. The idea that the environment is about critters and creeks is a thing of the past. We have to be thinking about these things in terms of consumption and disposal processes of mega-cities.

He added:

Sprawl is a response to racial fear and anxiety on the part of white elites. The 'burbs were designed as a vehicle to get away from people of color, investing more in the white infrastructure as they moved away from the city, and the neighborhoods where people of color live.

Does that mean the only environmentally-sound, antiracist thing for whites to do is move back to the inner cities. Yes, it does.

Interview with Van Jones [Alternet]

According to TreeHugger:

Today, the workers behind the Flip Flop Recycling Project run the gamut from beachcombers to bead-makers and artisans and sculptors and are producing jewelry, sculptures, toys, household products and accessories. Part of the project's mission remains social — to create jobs for people with limited opportunities. Recently, the project expanded to begin reusing the garbage of low-income communities in Nairobi such as Kibera, Musongari and Ongata Ongai.

Since so much of our cultural debris is non-biodegradable, we're likely to see efforts like this proliferating. Over the next decade it may become more and more common to see plastic shoes drifting in on the tides than seaweed. Image courtesy of UniqEco.

Flipping Kenya's Coastal Flotsam [TreeHugger]